Responding to complexity in socio-economic systems: How to build a smart and resilient society?

TL;DR

This paper discusses the increasing complexity of socio-economic systems due to connectivity and interdependence, exploring strategies for building smarter, more resilient societies amidst these challenges.

Contribution

It provides a framework for understanding various types of complexity in socio-economic systems and proposes approaches to enhance resilience and adaptability.

Findings

Complexity in socio-economic systems is rapidly increasing due to connectivity.

Building resilience requires understanding structural, dynamic, functional, and algorithmic complexity.

Strategies for resilience involve adaptive, flexible, and interconnected system design.

Abstract

The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace. And it has changed in a much more fundamental way than one would think, primarily because it has become more connected and interdependent than in our entire history. Every new product, every new invention can be combined with those that existed before, thereby creating an explosion of complexity: structural complexity, dynamic complexity, functional complexity, and algorithmic complexity. How to respond to this challenge? And what are the costs?